Gandhiji’sinner nature
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The word “ecology” appears nowhere in Gandhiji’s writings, and he never spoke about environmental protection as such. Yet, as the Chipko Movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and in a very different context, the manifesto of the German Greens have shown, the impress of Gandhiji’s thinking on ecological movements has been felt widely.
The Norwegian philosopher, Arne Næss, who came up with the idea of “deep ecology”, had said it is from Gandhiji that he came to the realization of “the essential oneness of all life”.
Gandhiji was a practitioner of recycling decades before the idea caught on in the West, and he initiated perhaps the most far-reaching critiques of the ideas of consumption and that fetish of the economist called “growth”. Thus, in myriad ways, we can believe that he was a thinker with a profoundly ecological sensibility.
In one of the several books that he wrote on India, V.S. Naipaul skewered Gandhiji for what he called his “narcissism”. Naipaul says Gandhiji’s autobiography is stunningly silent on the landscape, trees, vegetation, or the much-vaunted English notion of “nature”, though he spent three years in London as a law student. It is certainly the case that Gandhiji was sparse in his discussion of the relationship of humans with their external environment.